ethics

Have you ever being to a hospital recently? Well, I am sick enough to think of every detail even if I am inside a building called a hospital. 😛

The big picture is as follows. A building, full of personnel working both for treating the patients, and for keeping the right order inside the building. I am not going to talk here about the way of treating the patients. The purpose of this post is to present some points about the human behavior when being in an environment which is under control for certain reasons, while the patient is changing his/her behavior because of being in a certain situation. How can the human behavior change in environments like that, and what is the right way of organizing the system in order to be able to deal with a behavior like that?

Human behavior is uncertain and extremely complex in order to predict what it can be. The human behavior though in an environment which presumes that the human is in a specific situation, might limit the uncertainty. In a hospital environment the human has the need of getting help and also the need of relying on someone else. The origins of the human, the family or the experiences may not change enormously the behavior making it easy to understand the basic principles of how we behave in difficult circumstances.

Everything would seem simple in this way, it is not… the system supporting the environment of a hospital can’t even deal with that kind of uncertainty, obviously stemming out of the human obedience when he/she is is need. Competition, freedom and selfishness are still there while informational influence is not. Ethics is the main constrain. Understanding and help are not enough, bureaucracy, control and restrictions are the tools used by the system to make itself work effectively and efficiently.

Yesterday, I was watching a TV series trying to relax. I heard the phrase “not being always right, doesn’t mean we are wrong”. I started thinking how this relates with my experiences, trying to find the best approach about something and trying to communicate the best possible way with someone.

Let’s say that you want to communicate with your girlfriend. Everything is amazing and something happens (usually something stupid) and instead of the man being right, because he did everything right except that small tiny thing, he are wrong…… It is the same thing happening when managing a project, or being a CEO. Everything can be amazing, until the point that something that is not within your power comes up and instead of being the amazing project manager or CEO, you become the wrong one.

No matter what I say above, the philosophical side of being right or wrong goes back to ancient Greece, when Socrates and Aristotle wrote about those terms. Having self-knowledge is what Socrates proposed, and he also posited that humans would do naturally what is good if they know what is right. Wrong according to Socrates is made because of ignorance.

It seems though that the philosophical side I just mentioned doesn’t fit with the personal relationships or the business field I mentioned before. Well… at least if someone has self-knowledge and knowledge of the environment, he/she would know whether he/she does something in a right way.

There are more interesting theories about what is real, right, wrong today, based on the work of Woolf, Althusser and Foucault. For example, what makes something right or wrong depends on the obligations that the person has against someone else. What Aristotle and Socrates said is only a part of the whole way of thinking about what is right and wrong nowadays.